From Agribusiness to Agroecology

Here’s my talk from the Historical Materialism conference last month, as part of the panel on “Utopia, degrowth, and ecosocialism”. I take us from agribusiness to agroecology in 18:10.

If only it were that easy. But I think it’s a good summary of our present global trap and a few steps toward an exit out. Big picture, it won’t be just a matter of good ideas in alternate food systems as many a well-intentioned academic presents.

With appearances by the Chicago Bulls, Berta Cáceres, Cargill, Amílcar Cabral, and–yes, there is such a thing–the Kansas Military Agribusiness Development Team.

(Profits + Pathogens) – People

I tend to steer clear of biopolitics, what until recently have been Foucauldian investigations of the means by which human life processes are managed across regimes of knowledge and power. But the crux of sociologist Marc Aziz Michael’s more Marxian post is very much worth elaboration.

In contrast to evolutionary psychologists Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley, and the fascistic and lobster-spined self-help guru Jordan Peterson, Michael describes the extent to which capital accumulation is almost entirely a cultivated sensibility, one in conflict with humanity’s long understanding our fates are tied to the state of the ecosystem.

Capitalism is no basic instinct housed in an already dubious projection of our biologies. A system teetering on its metaphysics and modes of social reproduction alike must promote the Pinkers and Petersons, the far stupider Webers and Nietzsches of our day, to claim otherwise.

Book Bites Back

The final proofs have been edited. The website is approaching the landing page. The guerrilleros are amassing along the capital’s limits. Our new book, at 68 pages, as one co-author put it, packs a punch of a 300-page heavyweight. It is dense with critical insight.

If by the scope of our analysis alone, we offer some of the more cutting-edge modeling for vector-borne diseases such as Zika and malaria. We connect a series of pathogen-vector systems of Itô stochastic differential equations to the political economies of deforestation and neoliberal austerity.

As infectious diseases in an age of nation states and global health programs cannot, as much of the present modeling literature presumes, be described by interacting populations of host, vector, and pathogen alone, we also offer a series of control theory models. These models, useful to researchers and health officials alike, explicitly address interactions between government ministries and the pathogens they aim to control.

The new modeling also bites back. We criticize cost effectiveness analyses and the agricultural concept of endemic stability, key moments in modeling disease interventions, as part and parcel of an ethics of economism organized around minimizing state health expenditures. We ask whether along the way these scientific models help undercut global disease control in such a way as to protect corporate bottom lines.

The book is due out April 2018. You can pre-order a copy here.

For those who don’t have the cheddar to cover the cost of a book from an academic publisher, we recommend you ask your library to order it. Or you might order a MyCopy print-on-demand for $25 through your local research institution or library.

Prometheus Rebound

In embracing Prometheus, techno-optimists expunge Zeus’s succeeding curse, an omission that aligns right alongside their myopia around one of two of humanity’s sources of wealth.

Earth’s regenerative natural resources are clearly as necessary an input as human labor. Otherwise, ignoring we’d never have evolved in the first place, any cargo system organized around mutual aid, even resignified in opposition to the colonial enterprise, would be no better than breaking rocks.

Dilemma Tale

Perses, lay up these things in your heart, and do not let that Strife who delights in mischief hold your heart back from work, while you peep and peer and listen to the wrangles of the court-house. –Hesiod (700 BC)

Perhaps we suffer a neoliberal hangover believing victory to be found in choosing which ecological catastrophe will annihilate civilization.

Will it be the metabolic rifts disconnecting human health and food from the quasi-equilibria of a variety of ecosystemic cycles spooling apart? Will it be the metabolic shifts in the new pathogens and pollutions capitalism selects for but we payless cannot survive for long? Or is the bourgeois episteme unraveling across multiple domains, producing monsters of omission and commission alike?

Do we play the Tannhäuser, our fates at momenta beyond men and gods alike, finding solace in a death drive proving our rival priests wrong? Will there be relief in an epitaph that reads, “I…was…right!” Or, the golden age in us, will we find the path out the grand trap in the faces of our children?

Impermissible Exchange

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” –Philip K. Dick (1969)

For some, Jean Baudrillard writes in postmodern twaddle. I recommend reading him first as heady science fiction that suddenly rewards that suspension of disbelief. After all, even a scientist in the age of agribusiness R&D, freighted with the humiliation of the end of curiosity-driven science, must retain a morsel of self-respect.

While Karl Marx illuminates the capitalist machinery in–as Francis Wheen pointed out–the surrealist digressions of Tristam Shandy, a favorite novel, and István Mészáros in commodization’s epistemological costs, I find Baudrillard’s enigmatic aphorisms debone some of the metaphysical gobbledygook even modernity’s opposition accepts.

Don’t get me wrong, some Baudrillard is outright bullshit. His quantum physics envy is the hiding place of every pseudoscientific quack with an exit through the gift shop. I once walked out of a rapt Bay Area screening, wallet intact, for that cheap scam.

Ten Theses on Farming and Disease

Every once in a while, we have to take a stab at putting all the pieces together. In some ways these ten theses on farming and disease only touch on what I, and others, have been saying all along. But there’s a growing understanding of the functional relationships health, food justice, and the environment share. They’re not just ticks on a checklist of good things capitalism shits on. Falsifying Hume’s guillotine, embodying a niche construction at the core of our human identity, justice and the ecosystem appear to define each other at a deep level of cause and effect.

1. Contract farmers around the world are suffering cost-price squeezes. Producers are at one and the same time suffering increasing input costs and low or falling prices for their goods at the farm gate. The farmers are forced to chase an economic Red Queen. Individual farmers must increase production if only in an effort to cover for low prices that increases in production across farms helped depress to begin with.

2. The squeeze is a scam agribusiness is running on farmers. In enforcing high farm output, companies are seeking gluts that cheapen ingredients for their processed product lines. High output, producing food beyond global consumer demand, is also about making money off farmers contractually obligated to buy synthetic inputs they don’t need to grow us enough food.

3. The gap between cost and price, also a form of labor discipline, forces many farmers out, leading to plot consolidation as those smallholders and mid-level operations still left buy up abandoned land, banking on economies of scale, debt-financed mechanization, and appreciation in land equity to pull them through the artificial price squeeze.

Why Galen Erso Left Science

Here’s my talk at Mayday Books–“not making a profit since 1975”–on science, public health, and socialism. The talk was recorded by Don Olson of KFAI’s Northern Sun News, 90.3 FM on your Minneapolis dial.

I frame the talk within Star Wars and Rogue One, along the way touching on Lenin and Chayanov on agriculture, Clint Eastwood as hog farmer, the March for Science, explorer Alexander von Humboldt, the origins science and capitalism share, philosopher István Mészáros, actress Gabourey Sidibe on phone sex, the academic plantation, the industry of bleeding horseshoe crabs, abolitionist science, and the various relationships the left has shared with science, including during the Paris Commune.

In her follow-up, Karen Schraufnagel, Socialist Action’s vice-presidential candidate, unpacks her time as an economics academic.

Red Earth

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds. ― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

For a column to be published on Earth Day, the day of the March for Science, a reporter asked me three questions: Why are capitalism and environmentalism inherently incompatible? Why is industrial farming harmful to the environment? And why are corporate sustainability and carbon footprint reduction programs so often a farce?

Drawing from previous essays, the newly emergent ecological Marx, both sides of the John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore debate, and the clash over environmental destruction under pre-capitalist formations, I answered all three together in what follows, parts of which the columnist may excerpt.

Capitalism is fundamentally different from any other social organization in human history. There is the matter of scale, of course. The environmental destruction arising from the system’s mode of production is now global and geological.

Rogue Resistance

One can’t help but cheer the online resistance Fed scientists are waging against the anti-science Trump administration. Among them, Rogue NASA, NOAA Uncensored, and everybody’s favorite Alt US Forest Service: only you can prevent fascism.

But some of us were @Alt_CDC long before it was hip or took a Twitter handle.

Didn’t swine flu H1N1, Ebola Makona, H5N2 (and other H5Nx), Zika, cholera in Haiti, the vaccine gap for yellow fever, H7N9, Ebola Reston, MERS in industrialized camel, the opioid epidemic, and a surge in antibiotic resistance emerge under President Obama’s watch?

Wasn’t it the Obama NSF and NIH that failed to fund scientific efforts to explore the roles agribusiness, deforestation, structural adjustment, and global circuits of capital played in these outbreaks?